


Signal

by Tigerine (sealink)



Series: Heavy Rotation [3]
Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 18:06:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1867401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sealink/pseuds/Tigerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noiz works on several projects for Ruff Rabbit. Most of his attention goes toward a side project of his that will let him feel the sensations in Rhyme any time he wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Signal

**Author's Note:**

> my tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> tracked tag: #tigerine
> 
> Occurs before the game, in the same iteration of the game world as the rest of Heavy Rotation.

The computer chimed once, and a dialog popped up on Noiz’ Coil: _tc_Rhyme_GPSindex_allmates.library is complete._

Every week it was the same thing. The same data had to be collected, pushed through his algorithms, sorted into probability matrices and then predictions made. Every week he made enough money from his mathematical exploits to keep him alive until the next week.

Noiz rubbed his eyes to push the ever-more-insistent desire to sleep from them. He didn’t remember the last time he slept—had it been three days ago or four? The days and nights seemed to blur together, the way they always did when he was working on a piece of code. Soon he’d be done with this little side-project of his and he could get back to spending his spare time hunting for Rhyme games.

He turned his attention from a wall of code to the screen that flashed, waiting for his response. He clicked once, closing the dialog, and leaned back against the wall, scanning through the data and generating maps of Midorijima on the fly.

He’d collected Allmate data from Midorijima before, but that had been more of a census operation. What Allmates were being used and by whom was valuable information, but wasn’t good enough to create a predictive model. He was the first person to do collection of the data in realtime. He had usage statistics on each Allmate, including manufacturers, models and operating systems. Noiz also had stats on each player: their most used commands, attributes and attack, shield and durability values. But the key to making his Rhyme team the best on the island had been GIS.

Geographical information systems were not Noiz’s strongest area, but Mujina had been insistent that this was the direction Rhyme was going, and Noiz trusted his vision when it came to the future of the game. He’d already done something similar in Germany anyway, compiling information on Allmates there. They weren’t as widely used in Germany as they were in Midorijima, or even Japan. Here, the size of the data set dwarfed his previous work in terms of player base, satellite coverage, number of Allmates—here was where he’d made the breakthrough and determined how to predict Usui’s location with precision and accuracy.

It was no secret that Rhyme was taking off, replacing Rib, the local traditional outlet for disturbed youth and disaffected adults. Rib was only a step away from the yakuza, but they were unrelated; Ribsters viewed the yakuza as not-quite interlopers that needed to be carefully watched in their territory. The yakuza viewed the Ribsters as children playing at an adult’s game. Neither interested Noiz in the slightest. Rhyme was all that mattered.

He had his own reasons for collecting data on players and Allmates, of course, not that Mujina needed to be aware of that. His reckless, vicious style of play had earned him a reputation in the team: his undefeated record spoke for itself. It wasn’t something he was proud of, because it wasn’t something he chased after. The sensations he felt in Rhyme were what he was after; being undefeated was simply _gratis_.

Out of curiosity, he brought up the two other undefeated records in his database. Both were marked as ‘inactive’; the player had not used Rhyme within the last year. Noiz brought up this screen and stared at it at least once a day, rubbing his mind over the data, determined to figure out who they were and how he could get them in a Rhyme game.

Noiz collected the maps and database and sent them to Mujina over Coil. That should keep Ruff Rabbit squared away for a day or two. He was now free to take his cut of the revenue from the sales of information on Usui appearances and spend his time working on what he really wanted to do.

He turned his head back to the lines of code, beginning to type again without really thinking about it. It came as second nature to him, although it was a less than ideal existence. He coded because he had to, because his Rhyme games were so infrequent now that that there was nothing else to do. Even his coding was just a means to an end, a way to get more Rhyme games…of a sort.

Knowing the nature of Usui was required to know how it would behave, how it would generate Rhyme matches. From understanding behavior it was just a small step to begin reverse engineering Usui out of Rhyme. To that end, shortly after he’d been able to predict Usui’s location, he’d begun work on how to generate a Rhyme field without Usui.

Without Usui, elements of the game that were normally restricted became available to players that knew how to access them. Currently, that would only be Noiz. The damage conversion limit would be the first thing to go. It was intended to limit the amount of neural shock that could be converted to physical pain, but only stood in the way of the sensation, good or bad, that Noiz sought. The force quit option also had to go, or there was no point being able to surprise opponents without Usui; they’d just forfeit the match.

With a last glance over the code he’d written, he started the compiler. As the computer whirred away, Noiz turned back to the entries of the two undefeated Rhyme players. Well, he corrected himself, one undefeated player and one mystery.

The player’s record was old, but impressive. Hundreds of matches with astonishing damage totals; some of them had lasted only moments. They were ruthless, this Sly Blue. In his digging through old forums and ranking articles he’d found a brief mention of a series of hospitalizations having to do with Rhyme. Though the article didn’t mention a player name (or their fate), Noiz knew it had to be Sly Blue. The times and dates matched up, along with the beginning of their period of inactivity. Checking obituaries from the time hadn’t brought up anything interesting, so they hadn’t died, just disappeared, evaporating from Rhyme altogether. But Noiz would find them eventually, and he’d have his Drive-by ready when he did.

This left the other undefeated enigma.

The mystery had no name that he could find, and that was strange enough in itself. When Allmate chips were implanted, it was a medical procedure that required your real name and registration with Toue International, which administered the Rhyme servers. This person had figured out how to cheat the system and get a nameless profile, or they’d hacked into Toue and removed their name. Either one was worth investigating on its own.

But then the Allmate model caught his eye. It had to be a custom job, and those were rare _and_ expensive. It was like building a car without using any ready-made parts, with each part manufactured by hand. There were no stats on the Allmate: no indication of physical chassis, processor, memory, or serial number, and when he looked up the model name on Toue’s website, he got no results. The online mode was similarly missing information on special attacks, damage, appearance, and attributes.

Worse than that, Noiz could find no record of the players that had been defeated by this nameless player. He had records of matches that existed and damage totals that were recorded, but information on the opposing players had been lost or corrupted. They appeared as featureless blue heads in his information database, a short parade of anonymous Rhyme casualties.

Noiz’s fingers twitched in spite of themselves. This was the only thing he felt outside of Rhyme: the desire to get back into it, for sensation with meaning. Pain, stemming from the desire to destroy, to defeat, to kill. Pleasure, stemming from the feeling of sensation at all. He didn’t know or understand why Rhyme alone created this exhilaration, why he could feel things in the game. He just knew he needed more.

He stretched and got to his feet, trudging over to the bathroom to piss. As he washed his hands, he noticed a trail of dried blood from a deep gash across one of his knuckles. _Must have gotten that while working on those machines earlier_. It was rarely a case for comment.

The hours passed by slowly as he waited for the opportunity to test the code. Watching the compiler only provided him with the satisfaction of watching a bar fill to completion. He ordered some pasta and ate it without really tasting it, watching a German-language program on his Coil. He answered a rhetorical question asked by an interviewer in German almost out of habit, the same way he’d done when he was a child, talking back at the screens that were his only source of human conversation.

The computer chimed again, and this time Noiz sat up, setting aside the empty pasta container he’d been cradling, adding it to the pile of empty containers that teetered on the edge of the nearby table. The compiler was finished. He clicked the finish dialog and then moved the completed program to his Coil.

It didn’t really matter much who he tested it on, but he was impatient to know if it had worked. Mujina was the kind of guy who learned better through experience, and beating him in a Drive-by would be more instructive than just telling him. He shoved his feet into his shoes and grabbed his Allmates. Mujina’s apartment wasn’t far at all; most of Ruff Rabbit lived in the Western District. He still placed a Coil call as he walked up to the building and started preparing his Drive-by.

“Hey.”

“Noiz? Got your files several hours ago. Don’t usually hear from you for a few days after that.” The sound of a creaking chair came over the Coil and then the sound of a lighter.

“Don’t light that cigarette.” Noiz’s hands flew over his Coil, patching into the local node of the Rhyme servers.

“Why not?” He sounded skeptical, but Noiz didn’t hear the typical slow exhale that Mujina usually did when he lit up.

“You’re about to be in a Rhyme battle.”

The chair creaked again; he was leaning forward to look at the schedule they’d generated from data. “That’s bullshit, Noiz. We have all the predictions made already.”

The handshake with the Rhyme servers was complete and waiting for an administrator’s commands. Noiz sat down outside Mujina’s apartment. “This is an unpredicted game,” he responded.

“What? Unpredicted? Noiz, what are you—“

Noiz closed the call and ran the program.

The concrete pad, the wall of the apartment, the night sky, the entire world; it all fell away in chunks and shards, replaced with the wireframe reality of a Rhyme field. Noiz felt— _felt—_ the sensation flood into him. His injured hand ached and throbbed and Noiz breathed a small giggle of relief at the sensation, the way one did when a massive amount of pain was expected but never came. For Noiz, the relief upon feeling anything at all, pain or pleasure, was not unlike euphoria.

He got to his feet just as Usagimodoki popped into existence next to him.

“Noiz!” The rabbit Allmate paused, frowning. “This is not a normal Rhyme session!”

“Yeah,” Noiz said, the corner of his lips lifting. “It’s not.”

Usagimodoki absorbed his master’s words, looking to his left and right as the rest of the bunnies sprang into this virtual reality. “Then, this is your Drive-by? It works?”

“It does.”

The small rabbit turned to the other group of Allmates and nodded, tugging his hat forward and adjusting his microphone. “We’ll do our best!”

As the lobby dissolved around them and gave way to Noiz’s custom battlefield, he noticed something at the edge of his peripheral vision. He knew the rhythmic pulses of light that traced the wireframes like a babe knew its mother’s face; the shape of the light wasn’t part of the normal Rhyme field. It wasn’t much, just a flicker of movement that seemed too bright, too fast, too irregular for the dark space of the battle lobby. He turned his head to look at it, chasing it with his eyes the way one tries to track a bug that seems to flit in and out of the field of vision. The smear of light was vaguely shaped like a person, a head and body, but that was all he could determine from what little he could gather out of the corner of his eye. No matter how fast he turned his head, he couldn’t catch the… figure? Shadow?

Probably just a line of unresolved Usui code that was getting called, something he thought he’d written out. He shook his head; he’d deal with it later, after he showed Mujina exactly what Rhyme was like without being dependent on Toue and their gamemaster.


End file.
